Rodenbach, grandfather and me: Echoes and premonitions of the First World War

Abstract

The interpretation of individual lives and the history of the silences within the life of a family are placed here in the context of the imaginative mapping of Europe in the late nineteenth century, the period leading up to the First World War and its sequelae. I explore this terrain using two strands of psychoanalytic thinking: Abraham and Torok's work on the intergenerational transmission of trauma, and Steiner's theory of the psychic retreat. I apply these to think about my grandfather's experience of life in the trenches and his subsequent long-term occupation of physical and emotional space within our family. I also examine my own psychic retreat into reading, and my literary and imaginative preoccupation with the late nineteenth century world of my grandfather's childhood. In particular, I explore Georges Rodenbach's symbolist novel Bruges-la-Morte, its ambivalent treatment of women, and its metaphors of water, inundation and withdrawal. This novel is a projection onto place of the ruinous consequences of the repudiation of loss, a meditation on Eros and Thanatos. I have found it haunted and haunting, and illuminating about the role of women in containing and carrying the projections of traumatic losses inflicted across generations of human history.